


Foam to Light

by Colourofsaying, Hagar



Category: Den lille Havfrue | The Little Mermaid - Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid - All Media Types
Genre: Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, F/M, Gen, Mermaids aren't human, Podfic, Podfic Length: 1-1.5 Hours, Unrequited Love, excessive geological metaphors, probably unnecessary amounts of alliteration, the sea does not love well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-07-18 01:15:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19966306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Colourofsaying/pseuds/Colourofsaying, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hagar/pseuds/Hagar
Summary: The sea's love is terrible, longing to possess, changing what it touches, destroying what it holds.She began in storm. A deep cold came in from the north and stirred the skies to storm and the seas to surging. The waves rose to meet the wind, their cold currents intermingling, and lightning leapt between them. Water and air married, became one, and then she was, daughter of the sea, beautiful like a storm.There were no ships then. She was the youngest daughter of the king of the sea, but she was old when the first ships came. It had been a long time since the world was young enough for mermaids.





	Foam to Light

**Author's Note:**

> Text and art by Colourofsaying, audio by Hagar.
> 
>  **Podficcer's Notes:** the podfic of this work is available in 3 versions. The longest one has an operatic-style prelude, and multiple soundscapes embedded throughout the fic. The mid-length one has the soundscapes, but no prelude. The shortest version has no soundscapes or SFX - it's voice-only. All three versions are available both to stream and to download. For a complete list of the source sounds used in the creation of these soundscapes, please see the end of this work.

**Complete Version** | Length: 01:22:38 | [Stream](http://k007.kiwi6.com/hotlink/eubbg26taf/Foam_to_Light_complete.mp3) | [Download MP3 (83.15MB)](https://kiwi6.com/file/eubbg26taf)

 **Soundscapes Version** | Length: 01:17:05 | [Stream](http://k007.kiwi6.com/hotlink/c9gkhsafm5/Foam_to_Light_soundscaples_no_prelude.mp3) | [Download MP3 (75.75MB)](http://kiwi6.com/file/c9gkhsafm5)

 **Voice Only Version** | Length: 01:07:46 | [Stream](http://k007.kiwi6.com/hotlink/n5e21bwzrc/Foam_to_Light_voice_only.mp3) | [Download MP3 (63MB)](http://kiwi6.com/file/n5e21bwzrc)

Each wave crests, sparkling, and falls, rushing up the sliding sand, and the foam comes with it, surging over the water to touch the shore beyond. For a brief moment, it clings to the land, before it is pulled back into the ebb and flow of the sea with the retreating wave. Tendrils of foam clasp the land, longing fingers, then fall back to the water and reform to a whole.

Once, the land belonged to the sea. The sea encircled it, kept it hidden and precious, brushing currents across the promise of ridges and settling smooth and heavy into suggestions of valleys. But the land looked up and saw the sun, and it rose until it broke free of the sea’s embrace. It stretched mountains towards the sky, and filled those mountains with trees. Green spilled down from the heights and into the valleys, and the land no longer belonged to the sea but to the sky.

Once, the land belonged to the sea. The sea pressed down on it, kept it locked up and secret, held down the whisper of mountains and the dream of valleys, until one day the land surged out and up until it found the air and the sun and somewhere of its own, suspended between the blue of the sky and the echoing blue of the deeps, touching both, belonging to neither.

And the sea cannot forget that the land was once part of it, any more than the land can forget that once it belonged to the sea.

She began in storm. A deep cold came in from the north and stirred the sea and sky to storm. The waves rose to meet the wind, their cold currents intermingling, and lightning leapt between them. Water and air married, became one, and then she was, daughter of the sea, beautiful like a storm.

There were no ships then. She was the youngest daughter of the king of the sea, but she was old when the first ships came. It had been a long time since the world was young enough for mermaids.

“They were ours once, Father,” her sisters said, watching the shadows trail the ocean floor. “We remember when they were ours, when the dream of them drifted the ocean floor, before the land rose and left us. Let us take them, Father.”

Her sisters. Forces, all of them, born in the deep sea currents, the crushing cold, the rending of tectonic shifts, deep-sea volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis. Restless and still, cold and hot, they all remembered that these things that floated so far above them had once belonged to them.

But their Father was older still, and made of many things.

“You may have what falls beneath, daughters. You may have what your storms shatter and bring down, and once a year, when you are ready, you may rise up out of the sea to sit on the rocks in the moonlight. Not yet. Wait.”

And so they waited, and so they dreamed.

“I want to see this thing they call a forest,” said one. “It cannot be more beautiful than the flowing drifts of seaweed, or the tall spires beneath the water. But perhaps it is, and perhaps that is why the land left us.”

“I will find a town,” said another. “I will hear the bells that sometimes echo beneath the waves, and I will see if that is why the land left us.”

“I will watch the birds in the sky,” said a third. “Grandmother says they swoop and flash like the fish beneath the sea. They cannot be brighter or more beautiful. But perhaps they are, and perhaps that is why the land left us.”

“I will look at the creatures on the land,” said the fourth. “It’s said they are like our people here, but strange in texture, soft and warm at once. It may be that they are why the land left us.”

“I will look at the stars,” said the fifth, and the eldest. “They are neither of the land nor the sea, but of the sky, though they glow like the luminescence of the sea. Perhaps they are why the land left us.”

“I will look at the ships,” said the youngest. “They belong to the land, yet they drift over us. Perhaps they want to be with us once again, only they have lost the way.”

She stirred the water gently, and lightning sparked through her fingers, down the slate-gray scales of her tail.

Time passed, and one after another the mermaids rose, and the land was shaken and battered and burned with their coming. The forests writhed, the bells clanged, the birds fell sodden from the sky, the animals fled, the stars were covered in ash and salt spray, and the mermaids could not understand why the land had left the sea.

“Our forests are much more beautiful, more varied, more colorful,” said one. “And they don’t fling sharp bits at one just for looking.”

“Our fish are lovelier, and much more durable!” said another, with some indignation.

“I suppose the bells were nice, but they made so much noise, I don’t see how anyone could get a bit of rest,” said a third. “Banging away all the time like that. It gave me a headache!”

“Those animals may be warm and soft, but they’re so skittish I don’t know how one is supposed to find out,” said the fourth.

“As for the stars, they were nothing to the luminescence of the sea,” said the fifth. “Really, I don’t know what the land could have left us for. Perhaps it was your ships, dearest.”

“Was it really so terrible?” asked the little mermaid. She had dreamed of her rise for so long, how the bubbles would stream behind her through the quiet water, falling back into the darkness, drifting away, as she came closer and closer to the glow of the sky. She had imagined the way the water would change around her, grow warmer and clearer and brighter, like the warm waters that belted the oceans, the way it would feel for her head to break through the surface of the water, to take her first breath of the sky’s air. How it would feel, for lungs unused to breathing in such a way. If it would hurt. And most of all, she had dreamed of the dark shadows that swept the ocean floor, the rhythmic rise and fall of the long shadows, the soft billowing of others. What did they look like, these shadows, from above the waves?

“Yes,” her sister said, “and no.”

“It was,” another said, slowly, “and it wasn’t.”

“There was something about it all,” said a third.

“We wanted her,” said the eldest, “and we could barely touch her, for all our strength. She rose away from us once, and we can never have her back, and the old ache of it is still there, no matter how paltry her desires seem. And thus it was terrible, dearest, but perhaps you will not find it so.”

She smoothed a hand over her sister’s crackling hair and showed her a bay where the oysters grew fat and sweet and salty, for the newest of the mermaids was still far too young to rise to the surface of the sea, and it was good for her to dream. And so she ate and swam and drifted with her sisters, wove garlands of sea creatures for her hair and made gardens of coral and far above her, the stars continued in their journeys, and far below her, the earth turned.

The earth turned under the heavens, and the waters of the world lapped the shore. On the land, the forests grew taller, fell, and grew again. The villages with the lonely bells became cities of a hundred bells, and the youngest of the mermaids grew and grew, till the king of the sea called his daughters to him.

“Does the surface still call you, my wild one?” he asked the little mermaid. “Your sisters have risen one by one, and they are troubled by what lies above my waters.”

She flicked her tail, considering. St. Elmo’s fire streamed from her fingertips and the points of her fins, casting the court in its lambent glow. 

At last she said, “I have heard my sisters, and still I would sit on the rocks in the moonlight. I have heard of the forests, the birds, the animals, the bells, the stars, and I would know for myself what else there is to know.”

The king of the sea nodded. The fronds of seaweed in his hair drifted with the movement, and with the gentle currents of his undersea court. His face was grave.

“Then go to the surface, and see what may be seen. Only this: speak to no one above the waves, daughter.”

She barely heard him. Her ears were full of dreams, of bells that rang through air and wind that rustled through trees and water.

The water was still as she rose to the surface, bubbles streaming out behind her as fine as the lace of a wedding veil, fluttering briefly before dissolving into darkness. As she rose, the weight of the water lightened till it felt as if it barely brushed her skin, as if she slid through airy nothing. It warmed her strangely, like the water near the vents of her sister’s undersea eruptions. She tilted her head back, the ocean pressing against the skin of her cheeks as she pushed upwards. Above, a cold light sent shafts deep into the sea.

The air was still as she broke the mirrorlike surface, so that the mermaid felt she was swimming in stars, drinking in moonlight through her gills. She only knew she was still in the sea from the reflected path of the icy moon, and from the still, dull darkness of stones some distance off. Yet the air hummed with voices, the clink of metal and glass, and a strange sound, lovely as the song of whales, but lighter. The notes of it swam around her, bright and fluttering, a school of tropical fish.

She turned in the water, looking for the source of the sound. Some distance off there was a ship, and the shadow of the ship that lay on the water in the moonlight, light sparking in the darkness from reflected candles. She had never seen a light like this before, flickering and bright as sea goldies playing in the coral reefs.

A light wind riffled the water, shivering the stars and tugging at her hair, teasing a few curls loose to brush against her face. She swam over to the rocks, wincing as the rough surface scraped at her scales. The rocks underwater were kinder, without the gravitational imperative that made her thud and slip gracelessly on the damp stone. But from her perch she could see the ship more stably. Figures lounged against the railings, moved idly back and forth along the deck, moved with purpose among the sheets and cords of the rigging. Strange scents she had no name for blew towards her, dizzying in their complexity. She gulped at them, running the air over her nares as if it were water. Metallic, vegetal, sweet, acrid, they burned across her senses. She turned her head towards the stones, huffed at their familiar hollow scent, the ordinary pulpy greenness of seaweed, and under everything, the salty smell of home.

A stronger breeze tugged at her hair, whipping it around her shoulders. She heard the rigging creak and the dull, syncopated thumps of the booms. The wind brought voices to her ears, too, speaking what she knew was language, though she could not recognize the words. How strange were these people of the land. In their way, they seemed as developed as the people of the sea, as complex. Their hands flashed, full of things she could not name, though had from time to time found in tangles of wood at the bottom of the sea, twisted and dull in the sand.

A shadow moved between the stars and their reflected counterparts, and then another. They grew as they crossed above her, billowing up and up, reaching out wispy arms and pulling in moisture from the air to swell into shifting curves. Her own body seemed to shift in sympathy, its borders growing indistinct. Wavelets lapped at the rocks, their rhythm growing faster as the wind picked up, pulling at her hair. She ran her hands through it, marveling at the lightness of it, the way the dry fibers caught at her fingers and belled out in the wind as she stretched out her hand.

On the ship, a solitary figure walked to the forecastle deck and stood alone, leaning his forearms on the railing. The strange warm light trailed after him and settled in his hair, along his shoulders. She pushed off the rocks, swam closer. The waves lifted her, tossing her through the water.

The ship rocked, but the man stayed steady, as if nothing of the water could touch him. She swam closer. His eyes were green, greener than seaweed, green like the forests her sister spoke of. Fire danced in them from the lantern on the prow. 

She swam closer. When the fish rose suddenly from the bottom of the shallow sea and stirred the silt, and the sun spun it into shining gold - that was his skin, his smile. The waves slapped the side of the ship. Above her, thunder rumbled, and she laughed. The water tugged at her hair like the wind. Lightning split the sky. The others called to the man, but she did not understand their words. He turned to them.

Lightning struck the ship. The mast splintered, fell. How fragile the shadows were! But once it was gone, the land-beings would be safe in the water. She turned her attention to the storm.

Rain fell. The mermaid turned her face to the sky, let the strange saltless water rinse her skin. It trickled down her skull, through her hair, wriggling to her neck, and then there was water below and water above, salt spray mixed with rain till the air was water and the water air, and the waves tossed her ever higher. She sang, then, exhilarated with the joy of the thing. Her voice twined with the clamor of the thunder, the breath-stealing crack of lightning, the roaring rain, a high, sheer ululation.

The ship groaned. The sails were shredded now, tangled and limp in the shattered wood and rigging of the masts. Fragments of wood floated in the waves. The men clung to the railings, the stumps of the masts. She wondered that they did not enter the water, which was free of these sharp and strangling things. Perhaps they were too proud of what they had made, and were grieving for the loss of it. But it was sinking, the fiber of its being twisted beyond endurance, the creaking and shattering of it echoing out even through the storm, and the weight of it pulled the water down with it.

The mermaid dove, then, deep into the water. There, all was still, or as still as it ever was, untroubled by the air’s maddening ways. She watched the ship sink, the bubbles rising from it, the slow grandeur of its descent to the blackness. Around it, the sailors, drifting, as ghostly as jellyfish. She waited. Perhaps the shock of the ship’s sinking, its sucking plunge into the water, had frightened them into immobility.

They sank into the darkness. She swam to one and, cautious, touched him gently with the tip of her finger. His flesh was leaden, unresponsive to the touch. His eyes were open. She floated a hand in front of his face, moved it back and forth. He did not respond.

She swam from man to man. None moved. None breathed. And none was the golden man from the ship’s bow. Had he already sunk so far? She dove deeper. She could not find him.

She surfaced. Pieces of the ship littered the waves around her - barrels, weedy tangles of rope, shattered spars. She swam carefully through them, dodging the rubble the relentless wind hurled down at her. Lightning illuminated it piece by piece, but none was the one she was looking for. 

A flash of lightning glinted off something at the edge of the wreckage. She slipped between the splintered wood and rope, but it was only a golden cup, wedged into a tangle. She plucked it free, turned it in her hands. It was a beautiful thing, and it shone so nicely, but it was not as beautiful as the golden man. Water sloshed into it, and she poured it out, but the next wave filled it again. For a moment, she forgot the golden man, pouring the cup and watching it fill again. 

Behind her, she heard a sound, like the distant echo of the ship’s creaking, like a whisper of whale song. She spun, her tail flicking out, and saw him. He lay on a piece of the hull, his eyes closed, his skin no longer golden but pale as the sand at the bottom of the sea. She began to swim towards him, but stopped - had her father not warned her against these creatures? But he had only told her not to speak to them. He had said nothing of freeing them from the sea. And the golden man was clearly not suited to the water - if she left him, the waves would rock and shake his bit of wood until he tumbled off it and into the darkness, and there he would drift into frozen stillness and nothing would be left of the way his eyes were green in the light.

Around her, the wind was rising again, whistling in her ears. She rose and fell with the waves, higher and higher. Water sloshed over the edge of the man’s raft, tilting it. He rolled towards the edge, then back again as the wave retreated. Another wave came, splashing the man’s face. He groaned again.

The mermaid slipped closer, the cup half-forgotten in her hand. The wind was howling, now, and the waves broke against her face, blurring her sight with their force. The raft drifted away from her, one length and then another, and it was that that decided her. She surged forward and grabbed the edge of the raft, pulling it to her. His head tilted, and his breath rushed out across her fingertips, warm.

Land was not far. She could feel the rise of it, the long bones of rock running out from the land into the sea, the way the currents were shaped and turned. She swam toward it, tugging the raft after her. It was awkward. The wood and nails bit into her, scraping her skin and scales, cutting her till the blood flowed. But the sharks would not come - they were busy, she knew now, with what she had left behind her. And there was not much a shark could do to the daughter of the king of the sea, but she would have to release the raft, and the rain poured down, and the waves slapped her hair into her face and tangled it around her arms till it felt as if she could barely move, as if she would never be able to push this burden to the shore and be done with it.

The land was not far, but the sea was her enemy now, as it had never been before. It fought her, tried to tear the raft from her hands, the man from the raft. When it finally grew shallow beneath her, she almost didn’t notice - it was not until the sand brushed her fins that she knew she had reached shore. She tugged the raft until it was in front of her, then gently pushed it onto the beach. She turned to go, then hesitated, reaching out. Her hand hovered for a moment above the man’s cheek. She had not been forbidden to touch men - only to speak to them. And he still slept.

Her fingers brushed his cheek, and his eyes opened, as green as the leaves of the trees just beyond the sand. He said something, but she did not understand the words. Her hand closed around the golden cup, and she fled.

Her sisters found her drifting in the kelp gardens, as still as the seaweed. She opened her eyes when they swam up, but she did not move. 

“Well, how were the ships, sister?” they asked. “Are they as grand as the whales?”

“Not so grand as the whales,” she said, and pulled out the cup. “And they are made by men. But they make these strange and shining things, also, and they fill the ships with them!”

Her sisters passed it from hand to hand.

“It shines like sunlight on my tail,” said one.

“It shines like sunlight on water,” said another.

“Look!” said a third, and dropped a pebble into it. “It is a cave for your hand.”

“Could a fish live in it?” asked the fourth, and caught one. She held it gently. It nibbled at the webs between her fingers. Her sister passed her the cup, and she slipped the fish into it. “See!”

Her eldest sister caught her by the hand, and pulled her some way off.

“You are not thinking of a golden cup,” she said to her sister. “It’s a fine game, the little fish-house, but what else did you find above the water?”

“A storm,” the little mermaid said. “A great storm. Why do they build such fragile things?”

Her sister flicked her tail.

“For the same reason the land left us, perhaps. What else did you find above the water?”

“Stars on the water. Strange lights. Songs. But I could not understand what they were saying.”

“Did you speak to them?”

“Father forbade me.”

“Did you speak to them?”

“I did not speak to them!” the youngest mermaid said. “I said nothing and sang nothing and they sank so far down. There was nothing left of them at all, in the end.”

Her sister sighed, bubbles wreathing her face and tangling in her coal-red curls.

“So we consume them,” she said. “So we possess them, in the end. What else, dearest, did you find above the water?”

She fluttered her fingers loosely through the water, watched the water bell out the webs. At last, she said,

“There was a man on the ship. The light loved him, and he was golden.”

“And he did not drown.” Her sister took her hand. “You should not have saved him.”

“His eyes were green as leaves.”

“You should not have gone so close to the shore.”

“His skin was warm,” the youngest mermaid said. “I touched his cheek, and it was warm, as if I were near one of your volcanoes.”

“There are reasons that you do not touch my volcanoes,” her sister said, sardonic. “So you took this man to shore, and you touched him. Did you speak to him?”

“Father forbade me.”

“Did you speak to him?”

“No, but what does it matter? I could have said anything, and he would not have understood. These landfolk speak a strange language.”

“He spoke to you,” her sister said. She reached out a hand as if to touch her sister, as if to pull her close. “He saw you.”

“I don’t know what he said,” the youngest mermaid said. She ran a hand through her hair, sparks darting from it, fading. “I wish I knew what he said.”

She drifted, restless, unsettled. A fish would burrow into the sand, flecks of luminescence flying out from its flailing form; the stars would appear on the still dark sea, and there she was, suspended between two starry oceans. So each place became another. The kelp in her coral gardens would drift with the wake of a passing fish, and forests stirred. An abalone shell lay abandoned on the sea floor, shining - a fish slid into it, and it was the golden cup. The men on the ship had raised them to their lips - she raised it to hers, and tasted nothing but brine. Each shadow became his ship. But there was nothing in the sea that spoke to her of the man, and so she found him in the emptiness, the lack, the turn of the head that found nothing, the stillness of the water. He was not beside her in her gardens. He could not be found in her father’s court. There was nowhere in the sea she could find his colors, no shell or call or song that held his voice.

“You are hungry, dearest,” said her sister. “Come and dine with us. The sweetest fish of the sea are for you. I have gathered oysters for you from the cold sweetwater bays, salads of the freshest kelps.”

The little mermaid hung in the water. Her tail was limp, and her hair billowed in her face. She made no move to clear it.

“All the fruits of the sea for you, sister. Scallops icy and soft and sweet.”

“I wonder what they eat, the men of the land,” said the little mermaid. “What strange things must grow there. Perhaps he is feasting now, tasting land-kelp and land-fish.”

“You are tired, dearest,” said her sister, swimming closer. “Come rest with us. We will sleep in a shell of pearl, sheltered from the currents, warmed by the core’s vents.”

“How do they sleep on land?” asked the youngest mermaid. “The water does not carry them - the rocks were harder than anything I have felt. What softness do they rest in?”

“You are lonely, dearest,” said her sister, wrapping an arm around her sister’s shoulders. “Come and laugh with us. We will weave ropes of pearls into your hair. We will make necklaces of shells and pretty stones. We will sing until the spired stones ring, and know the shape of the world.”

“How can we know the shape of the world, when so much of it is out of our reach?” asked the little mermaid, twisting out of her sister’s arms. “Sister, I am hungry, and I can never be satisfied. I did not know our home had walls until now, when everything I want is beyond them.”

“Would you leave us, then, for this land-man of yours, for colors you’ve never seen and words you cannot understand?” Her sister flicked her tail, tossed her hair over her shoulder. “You have been so happy here - can’t you be happy here again?”

“The land took me when I went to see the ships on the water,” the little mermaid said, “and the water is not home to me. My home is there. My home is where he is.”

“But you don’t know him!”

“I know him. I know the sound of his voice. I know the way his hair curls in the water, the way it shines in the light. I know the shape of his smile, his shoulders, his hands, the way that he moves when he moves on land, the way that he holds on, the way that he is strong. I know that I love him,” said the little mermaid. “I love him until I am sick with it. It follows behind me, it is between me and everything that I look at. I can never be happy in the sea, because he is not there.”

Her sister brushed the hair from her face and took the little mermaid’s hands in her own.

“If you could somehow go to him,” she said gently, “would you?”

“What do you mean?”

“If there was a way. Would you?”  
  
“There is a way for us to leave the sea?”

“Would you? Would you leave your sisters, who love you so dearly? Would you leave your home, where you are safe and comfortable? Would you trade your tail for legs, even if every step that you took with them felt as if your fins were being sliced by broken shells?” She held her shoulders. Her fingers bit into the little mermaid’s flesh, tugging at her scales. They burned hot against her skin. She barely noticed. “Would you, if the cost of it meant you could never come home, whether or not he will have you?”

“He will have me,” said the little mermaid. “Did I not keep him from the sea? Do I not love him so dearly?”

Her sister was still in the water. Her hands fell to her sides. She turned away a little.

“I wanted you to think better of your sadness,” she said. Her voice was quiet. “I thought you would be frightened. I would give whatever you need to make you happy. Do not ask for this.”

“Help me,” said the youngest mermaid.

“There are so many things that could make you happy. You do not need this.”

“Please help me.”  
  
“Even if I give you this, it may not make you happy,” her sister said. She turned back to the little mermaid, held out her hand, but the little mermaid did not reach for it. “It will hurt you so much. Dearest, don’t ask me for this.”

“Sister, will you help me leave the sea?” asked the little mermaid. Her eyes were too full of dreams to see her sister’s face. “There is nothing I want more. There is no greater gift that you could give me.”

Her sister was silent for a while.

“I will do what you ask,” she said at last, and her voice seemed to hiss and steam. “I will do what you ask, but here are three true things about the cost: you will have just three years to make him love you. If you succeed, you will belong to the land. If you fail, you will end. Once you stand on the shore, you can never return to the sea.”

“He cannot help but love me,” said the little mermaid. “It is an easy cost to bear.”

She had borne it as her sister led her to a distant cave, slipping between coral gaps so narrow they scraped and tore away her scales. She had borne the slicing of the shell that carved away her tail, had borne the sudden sting of the water on her raw flesh, had borne the circling, hungry sharks, the way they snapped at the scraps that floated away from this sculpting. She had not cried out, even as her sister had wept into the mess of her lower half, her tears burning like volcanic fire. She had asked for it, and she would not regret what she had begged for.

When her sister let her go in water so shallow she could stand, she walked away from her, and she did not look back. With each step, it felt as if her legs would be cut to pieces. With each step, as she rose naked from the water, her gills closed, and she gasped for breath. The dryness burned her lungs. She stumbled onto the beach, and there she rested, letting the cool, soft rain wash the salt from her new skin. 

She woke to someone shaking her shoulder and strange sounds pouring into her ears. Opening her eyes, she saw that she was surrounded by humans, who seemed upset to find her on their beach. They gabbled at her, but she could not understand them, and their words were lost in the roll of thunder. She blinked up at them, opened her hands in supplication.

She did not speak. She would not break the only promise she had made her father.

It was not long until her golden man came to see her, drawn to the village by the rumor of a strange, silent girl, washed up on the beach the day the rains had begun, as naked as the day she was born. It had not been hard to wait, there, and she had known he would come. He would feel that she was there and be drawn to her, pulled to her as inescapably as she was pulled to him. So she had waited, patient, and learned what she could of the way the land-folk lived.

When he came, he came in a great clatter and bustle, swinging down from the strange, snorting creature he rode and striding over to her. His clothes were bright, and the edges of them shone despite the clouds. She blinked up at him, startled by his height. In the sea, size had been a question of bulk, more than height - there had been nothing she could not look at eye to eye. Land lacked buoyancy. 

For all the energy of his motion, he looked somehow hesitant. He reached a hand out to her, stopped. She smiled at him, and lifted a hand, brushed it gently against his cheek. His eyes widened, and he spun around, shouted something at his advisors, before turning back to her, serious.

He spoke to her. The sound of his voice was like the rain on her clean new skin, like the pleasure of the blankets the villagers had given her for the cool nights, like the sound that the little river near the village made when it ran shallowly over the stones. She smiled at his voice, and wondered what he said. Love had given her legs, not language, and she began to feel the lack of it. She wanted, suddenly, to know what he was thinking, every scrap of thought and dream, to file it away until every expression was clear as water.

Seeing her smile, the man looked expectant. Gradually, the look faded into impatience, and then to confusion. And then, just for a moment, fear.

A villager came to him, then, and gestured at her, pointing to her mouth, then shook his head. The man nodded to him, turned back to her, and bowed low before her.

She heard the land-folk near them gasp. Perhaps the golden man was like her father, then, who did not bow to anyone. She flushed with pleasure and reached out her hands to him, raising him from his bow. Rain splattered on their joined hands, and the man looked at the sky, and gestured toward the creature he had ridden. He climbed on it, then pulled her up after him, settling her on his legs. She nestled closer, hearing the thump of his heart beneath his dampening clothes, and knew that she did not need three years.

It was all she had wanted. He walked with her, ate with her, spent hours talking to her, giving her the names of this and that. It wasn’t long before the words the land-folk used were no secret to her, the plants and creatures and people all in her head to look at when she wished. And they were marvels, though not as marvelous as his hand on hers, or his green eyes in the thin, misty sunlight that sometimes broke through the clouds.

But for all his pointing and naming, she would not speak. Perhaps that was why he began to leave her, she thought. She would give him anything at all, except her voice. That belonged to her father. It was all he had left of her. She wished she had left it in a shell in her garden, for him to pick up and listen to if he walked that way, but she had not done him even that small kindness. Perhaps she was unkind; perhaps that was why he began to leave her.

At first, the time he gave her was enough, and she was full with it, dazed and dreaming with the sun-mote glory of his hair and the sweetness that lurked in the shadows of his smile, but there were hours he did not spend with her, hours she could not have. He left her in her rooms with a smile and a promise, and disappeared to some other life she had no part of, and she hungered. 

The hunger grew. It was not long before he found her in corridors, a patient wraith outside the door of every meeting, and when he turned away, she was at the window, smiling and lovely as rain danced on the windowpane and thunder rumbled unceasingly. So he found her in the shadows of every room, watching him greet his guests, watching as he ate his meals. So she slipped into his room and watched him through the night, rapt with the way the humid air draped the sheets around his still and silent form.

She hungered for his touch. His skin was so warm, so dry, rough and soft like nothing in the sea. She would take his hand in hers, press it, play with his fingers until he pulled back. She wondered how his hands would feel on her shoulders, her back, her belly. If the heat of them would ease the pain in her legs. Holding his hands, she had tried to tug them down to her feet, wrap them around her calves, but he had jerked away, his face twisting. She had not seen him again that day, and could not find him, no matter how long she searched.

He still came to sit with her, still spoke to her sweetly, but each day his visits grew shorter.

“You are so pale,” he told her, walking in the garden. The grass sparkled with raindrops, and mist drifted between the hedges. All the flowers were drowned. “It becomes you, pearl that you are, but are you well?”

She smiled at him, as if every step was not agony, and worse than ever in the strange hard shoes they kept their feet in. She did not quite grasp the reason for them, but the prince did not care for it when she did things the women of his kind did not do - walk barefoot, stand out in thunder and in rain, catch fish in the stream with her hands and eat them there, scales slipping down her arms and throat like the mermaid she once was.

“Let’s go in. You can rest until dinner.” Frowning, he held a hand up towards the sky. “It’s starting to rain again. I can’t remember the last time we had a sunny day.”

No matter how much she tugged at his hand, pulling him towards the heart of the garden, he would not come, but dragged her inexorably toward the palace. Finally, tired of the exercise, he let go of her hand and walked away from her. Lightning flashed through the sky, and the world was white and black.

“Come if you want,” he told her, “but I will not wait for you.”

It would get better soon, she was sure. She only had one more year.

Moss crept up the palace walls, and the corridors echoed with the heavy coughs of those affected by the damp, though the prince was golden, still, and strong. When she walked the halls, she was alone. When she walked the gardens, she was alone. When the table was spread for a meal, she was alone. The walls of the palace hummed with activity, but she was not part of it.

Wandering the halls one day, she heard the prince’s voice, was pulled to it as surely as water to a depression. But there were other voices, and lately, she had not liked the way they sounded when they spoke of her. She stopped around a corner to listen.

“What would you have me do?” she heard the prince say. “She saved my life.”

“How could she have saved your life?” asked one of his ministers, a man who stepped into other corridors when he saw her walking down the hall. “She’s weak, she can’t speak, she winces when she walks. Perhaps your majesty imagined it. Perhaps it was only a girl _like_ this one, and not this one.”

“It was her,” the prince said inarguably. 

“Well, that’s one thing,” said the minister. “But that was years ago, and surely your gratitude is wearing thin.”

“She saved my life,” repeated the prince. “That sort of gratitude is without end, if not without limit. But she asks for nothing but a home, some company.”

“She asks for nothing, you mean,” the minister said rudely. “The wench can’t speak.”

“She does not need to. It’s true we cannot go on like this, but what would you have me do? The rain does not stop, our mines fill with water, our crops do not grow, we sicken. I cannot buy sunlight - what would I even buy it with?”

“The rain started the day she came.” The minister’s voice was flat. “Her hair’s gray as the sea before a storm. She has lightning eyes.”

“An unconventional appearance does not make her a curse, Minister,” said the prince. “Leave it. What other, more logical solution to our problem would you recommend?”

“If you won’t execute her? Banish her.”

“That is too far,” the prince told him quietly. His voice was cold. She wished that he had blazed for her.

“Then marry, your majesty. And for her dowry, food, work for your people in a sunnier land. Perhaps we can last a little longer - long enough for you to see sense.”

“Perhaps we can last long enough for the rain to stop,” said the prince. “She has nothing to do with it. I know there are rumors, Minister, but they must stop.”

“I will say nothing, your majesty,” said the minister. “But they will not stop. And neither will the rain.”

Rain beat against the window beside her, and little hailstones tapped at the glass. It had never occurred to her that it should not be like this.

For all the kingdom’s recent troubles, the prince was still a prince, and it seemed that princes were in short supply. Messengers sprinted in and out, greeted by halloos and redoubled rain. Parchments smudged in it, horses fell, but never enough. The hall still filled up with pictures.

She wandered through the hall at night, when the moon was full, looking from flat painted face to flat painted face. They all looked alike to her - some shifts in coloration, to be sure, but of a school for all that. And if they were a school of fish, maybe the prince was a shark, waiting patiently above them, choosing from them the fattest, most delicious of all.

When sharks circled, fish fled, hiding in the crevices. She gathered up the paintings by the armful and rushed from the room, tucking them behind curtains, under beds in empty rooms, deep in the cellars. He could not choose from what he could not see; he would grow impatient and forget the fish. He would only see her. And she was alive and bright and _there_ , and that would be enough.

It was not enough. The hall was empty in the morning; people shouted. Some came to see her, suspicious, but she smiled up at them from her cushions and tilted her head curiously when they spoke to her, and they went away unsatisfied. She was pleased, but one by one, the pictures were found, restored. The prince would not be so easily dissuaded from his prey.

When he saw her next, his eyes were tight. When she tried to touch his arm, he shied from her hand. It was a long time before he came to sit with her, and he did not sit so close again.

“Another messenger arrived today,” he said. “His offer is good, and it may go higher. That kingdom has three daughters, and none of them beautiful enough to wed for that alone. None are as strange as you - and none as lovely.”

She flicked her hand dismissively, and he laughed, but he would not take her hand.

“I am not marrying for beauty, am I? The girl can be pretty or plain, sweet or sour, and as long as she’s rich and of an age to bear children, it doesn’t matter. Princes marry for their lands, pearl, not for themselves.” He smiled at her. “If she saves my land with her money and trade, I’ll like her well enough.”

She stared at him.

“You think that’s not much to build a marriage on? You agree with my mother, then. But I think that I was married long ago - I think that I have been married since I was born. The land gives me company, sustains me, refreshes me. The land and its people rely on me. My country is the most beautiful wife that I could wish for, and she was given to me as a birthright. There is no woman born who could give me more than her.”

It seemed the land took everything, then. She had known how to vie with other women, but even the sea had never known why the land left it.

That night, every river in the kingdom flooded. But it was not enough.

The wedding was to take place by the ocean, not far from where the mermaid had come ashore. Most of the staff had already gone on. She had not realized how tired the constant press of others had made her, until the echoes in the halls reminded her of home. She had not known that she could long for something besides the prince.

She did not leave the palace as she had entered it three years ago, held tight within the prince’s arm. Now he rode far ahead of her, and he did not look back. No urging could make her horse move faster through the deep, slick mud. No touch could make him remember her. 

Trees cracked under the weight of water, and the rain thickened until she could not see where he rode. But the horses kept on, and they came at last to the sea.

She smelled it before she saw it, the salt of it strong even through the sweetness of the rain, carried on a freshening wind. Gulls called. The sound of the waves melted into the sound of the rain. And she could not go home.

That night, when the lights had died, she walked down the beach into the water. Alone, the pain of it made her weep. She did not stop until the water was at her waist, where once the scales of her tail had faded in. She did not look down; the water was clear and warm, and she could not bear to see beneath it. But no matter how tightly she held her legs together, the water seeped between them. Sand crept between her toes. The water did not carry her. If she fell, she would drown.

A long way off, she heard her sisters calling. She opened her mouth to call them to her, remembered the sleepers on the shore. Taking a deep breath, she ducked her head beneath the water, screamed out to them until the air left her lungs, till her eyes burned and sparked with the lack of it. She scratched at her throat till the skin bled, but her gills would not open.

A webbed hand pulled her hands from her throat, tugged her to the surface.

“Sister, you must breathe now,” her eldest sister said, and stroked her hair until she stopped coughing. “We have come for you.”

The little mermaid looked around her, and saw her sisters’ heads surfacing, their gills fluttering blackly.

“I have missed you so,” she said. Her voice rasped, and her tongue was heavy and sore. “I do not know how to tell you how I have missed you.”

“As we have longed for you,” her sister said. The mermaid smiled at her, fluttering her hands in the water. She looked at her sisters, at their beautiful, still, unchanging faces, at the strength of them in the water. Yet something was strange.

“Where is your hair, sisters?” she asked. Her sisters’ heads were shorn, their curls cut to their ears. They looked wrong to her, as if they had cut off a portion of their power with their hair.

“We cut it,” said one.

“For you,” said another. 

“So you could come back to us,” said a third.

“You must come back to us,” said the fourth. “It will be so simple to come back to us.”

“I only had three years,” the little mermaid said. “Three years have passed, and even though he does not love me, I cannot come back to the sea.”

“There is a way,” her eldest sister said. “We found a way for you. But we have done as much as we can, and you must do the rest.”

“Will he be angry with me?” asked the little mermaid.

“Our father is not angry with you,” her sister said. “He has never been angry with you. He blames himself, that he ever let you go to the surface. He blames me, that I did not love you well enough to tell you no.”

“He should not blame you,” said the little mermaid. “It was my choice.”

“I told you there was a choice to make. Will you do what must be done, and come back with us?”

“What must I do?”

Her sister lifted something from the water. It was dark and heavy and long, but it gleamed with color even in the moonlight. The mermaid ran her hand along it, felt the way it shifted in her hands, currents and deeps, sundering, erupting, restless and powerful.

“You can have him forever,” said one sister.

“You can take him down below with us,” said another.

“He will never leave you,” said a third.

“Take the rope,” said a fourth.

“Take the rope,” said her eldest sister. “Go where he lies, and wrap him in it, till he cannot move. Then wrap the last around his throat until the breath stops. When it stops, you can come home.”

“Any rope would do as much,” said the little mermaid.

“We put our power in it,” her sister said. “Another rope would kill the prince, but it would not take you home.”

“Our strength for our sister,” said one.

“A fair trade,” said another.

“It will come back in time,” said a third.

“Power does,” said a fourth.

“But you would not not,” said the first.

“And so we did what we did,” her eldest sister said. “Please come home with us.”

The mermaid stood in the water up to her waist, and she looked at her sisters, the scales twining up their bellies, the dark gills on their throats, the strange dullness of their chopped hair, the way the waves held them. She put her hands on the warm skin of her belly, dragged them down over her hips, looked down into the water. Legs. Feet. Not hers. They had never been hers. She would never have to look at them again.

A mermaid’s tail does not ache.

Her sisters circled her, touching her hair, her cheek, her shoulder, soft and familiar. The land-folk had touched her, in the palace - had braided her hair, helped her dress, led her from room to room. Not even the prince had touched her for love or comfort. Not even on that first day. 

If he ended, she would not. She would go back to the sea and her coral gardens, where fish swam and even the stones held life between and underneath them. She would go back to her sisters, to the deep sea and its secrets, to her father’s court.

She could rise above the surface for an evening now and then, and watch her storms destroy whatever floated on the sea.

“Does it rain because of me?” she asked her eldest sister. “Does the lightning strike the land because I am there?”

“Yes,” said her sister. “And it burns for me.”

“It shakes for me,” said another.

“It breaks for me,” said a third.

“It drowns for me,” said a fourth.

“Then it starves and what lives there ends for me,” said the mermaid. “I nearly killed him once.”

“He lived because of you,” said her eldest sister.

He could be hers, for a time. She could sing to him. She could tell him what she dreamed and what she feared, and he would listen silently, as she had listened. No one would call him from her. He would not flinch from her touch. 

In the sea, he would be transformed, as all things were. For a while, perhaps, his eyes would be green and his hair gold, his flesh firm in the deep cold, but the color would go out as a candle, and it would not be long until the little creatures came for what was theirs. The flesh would slough from his bones, unshape him until all that was left was spare and white. The bones would still be hers. She could make a garden of them, if she chose.

He lived because of her. 

“ _He_ will not starve because of me,” she said, “and when he dies, it will not be for me.”

“So you will die for him?” asked her sister. She was still in the water, and her voice was tense.

“No,” said the little mermaid. “For me. For my love, that saved him and made me a path out of the sea. My love, not his.”

“But he will die soon anyway,” her sister said. “And you will not, in the sea. You have until the water’s end. His life is nothing in the balance!”

“His life is not mine,” the mermaid said. “I wanted it to be mine, but he would not give it to me. I will not take it.”

“You are our gift, our last and precious sister, and it will break our hearts to lose you. No one loves him as we love you! No one will weep until the sea is barren with salt for the loss of him!”

“It was me that chose to save him, sister! I saved him from myself before - I didn’t know, then. I didn’t know! For all the ships and all the forests and all the stars, I would not have risen above the waves if I had known!”

“You die from guilt, then? You didn’t know!”

“Not guilt.” The mermaid took her sister’s hands, clutched at them. “ _I_ would not have raised a storm. _I_ would not have drowned a land. And _I_ will not kill a man to save myself from what I have done.”

“If I had known what you would choose,” her sister said. “I would have cut my flesh to limbs and held your hands to strangle him.”

The mermaid smiled and kissed her cheek. She let go of her hands, raised one to the shorn ends of her sister’s hair.

“You gave me a choice,” she said.

“We will always love you. I will always love you.”

“I know.”

Her sister held her for a moment more, then turned, and one by one, they vanished. 

She stood on the shore in the early dawn, watching the tide come in. The waves crested and fell, rushing up the sand, and the foam came with it, surging over the water to touch the land. For a brief moment, it seemed to cling to the land before it was pulled back into the ebb and flow of the sea’s rhythms. Tendrils of foam clung to her feet, then fell back to the water to reform into a whole. She fell with them.

The sun rises, flooding the empty shore with gold, the waves with silver, the foam with light.

Foam rushes over the sand, the dips and mounds of shells, the effervescence of air from the lives in the liminal space between land and sea. It breaks and reforms around the twiggy legs of birds, the sharp points of their beaks faint interruptions in the exhalations of wave. Breezes carry the scents of flowers, perfumes woken by the steady heat of the sun.

The waves wax and wane, and always they carry the foam with them, waves shattering it into form, pulling it again to formlessness. The turtles come, tired mothers with one last gift of a safe nest before hurrying back to the sea. The foam clings to their legs as if it could root them to the shore, but their children must make this first journey on their own, and so they continue, inexorable, and the sea washes the foam back to shore.

Birds leap and splash in the rivulets, sending flicks of foam flying, caught up in their courting dances. There are great contests, duels that leave the vanquished battered and ruffled, but after a while they stand, shake the foam from their feathers, and begin again, unbothered by their previous defeat. 

Sometimes the land takes a little of the sea and holds it awhile, cradled in a tide pool, and the life in it scuttles and creeps and burrows, free to live and grow in its own way - no gift, but a lending, received and returned with joy.

And that is why the land left the sea.

In the moment between night and the sun’s rise, the foam gathers. When the last of the darkness falls away, something new lies on the border between the land and sea.

**Author's Note:**

> The following sounds were used in the creation of this podfic:  
> \- 366159_dcsfx_underwater-loop-amb (freesound.org)  
> \- 17564_markfrancombe_earth (freesound.org)  
> \- 363122_el-bee_landmass-earth-rumble (freesound.org)  
> \- 82722_prozaciswack_digging (freesound.org)  
> \- 238295_regoss_thunderstorm (freesound.org)  
> \- 48412_luftrum_creanwavescrushing (freesound.org)  
> \- Tidal Wave-SoundBible.com-243524385 (soundbible.com)  
> \- Tsunami Wave 2-SoundBible.com-524318920 (soundbible.com)  
> \- 328452_soundexciting_party-sounds (freesound.org)  
> \- 91072_lxx-70-on-a-wooden-ship-at-sea-02 (freesound.org)  
> \- 101381_benboncan_creaking-floorboard (freesound.org)  
> \- 16480_marin-lightning_severe-thunderstorm (freesound.org)  
> \- 210837_abrez_dolphin-song-2 (freesound.org)  
> \- 23090_acclivity_weddingbells1 (freesound.org)  
> \- 69330_justkiddink_birdsong-march (freesound.org)


End file.
